Like something out of a dream, the Sea moved before Kindred, great lengths of plants of every kind rising just past the edge of the floor, each one catching edges on the diffuse light from the hallway, looking like shadow dancers moving on the edge of seeing. Behind and beyond and beside them was the darkness of the deeps, like an invitation.
Another scream sounded in the distance, not fearful but defiant, and Kindred knew without question to whom that voice belonged: Little Wing.
Voices rose in response, and soon Kindred heard the whole crew—at least those still alive after the flight from Arcadia, the wyrm attack, the journey to the Once-City. They, too, were in cells, much like Kindred’s if their shouted descriptions were to be believed. Two solid walls. One with bars. Each had a watcher seated just outside their cell.
And each cell had a missing wall, and beyond it, the Sea.
Another similarity that Kindred had not noticed at first: a line of white, chipped and faded, painted on the floor parallel to the missing wall, with width between it and the Sea of no more than the length of a person. Once she noticed the line, Kindred couldn’t stop looking at it. The unevenness with which it separated the cell into two spaces—one larger nearer the bars, one slimmer hugging tight to the Sea—gnawed at Kindred, a puzzle she did not have the pieces to solve.
Most of her crewmates sounded far away, and she imagined them all in a row, cells spread out from one another, separated perhaps by blank walls or empty cells. No one seemed to know what had happened to Ragged Sarah or Captain Caraway. Some guessed they were in their own cells but still unconscious, as Kindred had been only a few moments earlier. Others speculated that they had been taken away.
And a few thought them dead.
They were nine strong. Only nine left from The Errant’s mighty crew.
At first, Kindred thought these shouted conversations between the crew would draw the ire of the man outside her cell or the ones outside any of the others, people Kindred assumed to be guards.
But her quick glances over her shoulder showed no change in Kindred’s guard. When the crew made halfhearted attempts at planning an escape—impossible, they all soon realized—the man sat silently, watching. As Cora the Wraith sang a bawdy song insulting pirates in every way she could think of, the man sat silently. And so, apparently, did the watcher outside Cora’s cell, because she went on for some time.
Kindred even heard Little Wing shouting directly at her watcher. Snatches of her anger floated through Kindred’s cell.
“. . . cowardly monsters. I will be blight and ruin upon your world. I will be sickness and fever. I will curse your fucking skies. I will . . .”
Kindred even tried begging sanctuary again in that old prairie language, directing the torrent of sounds at her watcher.
But no matter what they did, individually or as a group, the watchers did not move.
Finally, they fell into a kind of stupor, silently tending their own thoughts—except for Little Wing, who continued to curse her watcher and the pirates who employed him.
Hunger had begun scraping the inside of Kindred’s belly, and her head had begun to swim with dehydration. She searched her mind for any clue, anything at all. The pirates didn’t want them dead; that much was clear. But why the cells, then? And why the watchers?
Kindred thought back to what Ragged Sarah had told her of the city, her mind working slowly, picking over the memories with clumsiness. Something about a column with words. And wheels stacked atop one another. And begging sanctuary. And Sarah leaving at a young age.
And a test.
It had been an offhand remark, Sarah mentioning a test—something she knew little about—for those who couldn’t beg sanctuary.
A test.
Had someone else said that? Kindred let her mind move slowly back to the moment she’d been hit—her head throbbed at the memory—and yes, she heard that man, his hair matted and grubby, say something about a test.
A test.
Kindred looked back at her watcher, seeing not a phantom meant to inspire fear but a man evaluating her. She looked around her cell, her gaze catching in the movement of the Sea for a moment before settling on that unsettling line of white.
A test.
Of what?
“Hey!” she shouted. At first, Kindred had shouted toward the wall through which she thought more of the crew were located, but she had since realized she had no real idea which side was better. And shouting while staring at her watcher seemed monstrous, so Kindred faced the Sea as she hailed the ragged remnants of the once mighty crew of The Errant.
“Hey! Everyone quiet!”
It took a few moments for Kindred’s call to reach everyone. A few had to shout down others who had fallen to their own madnesses. But finally they were quiet.
“This is going to sound insane, and it probably is, but I think this whole thing—the cells, the line, the watcher”—she peeked over her shoulder, and despite scratching at his temple, the man in the hallway was unchanged—“all of it is a test.”
A flurry of confused responses returned to Kindred.
“For what?”
“To stay?”
“So they don’t cut our throats?”
“To drive us mad?”
“Who is that? Is that Kindred?”
Though distant, she recognized Little Wing’s voice as the last one, and chilled at the anger in it, directed at her now.
“We’re here because of Kindred,” Little Wing shouted. “She lied to me—to all of us—so she could come here. Her and that pirate Sarah.”
“Little Wing—” But the once-acting captain of The Errant, the future captain of Norther, would not be interrupted. She told it all: Sarah’s past, Kindred’s betrayal, her own plan to take them to the Mainland, to safety.
“Our ship is gone because of Kindred. She and that pirate plotted to bring us here. I’m not listening to a damn thing she says.”
Silence troubled only by the movement of the Sea followed Little Wing’s shouts. Kindred opened and closed her mouth, trying to find something to say.
How could she make them understand the tiny fire that burned inside her, fed by the words of her grandmother’s letter and the imaginings of something truer than this surface world? How could she translate her dreams to them when they made so little sense to her?
Why the Once-City? Because it was a step in her grandmother’s wake. And because it was a step to a world wilder than what she had known. The Marchess had gone to find forever below the waves, and she had held a hand back for Kindred.
If you seek me, look below, she had written.
I’m chasing after my grandmother, and I’m chasing after the magic of a place I think exists below, she wanted to say. I’m seeking questions in the dark while you all are grasping for answers in the light.